Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
If neither intellect nor instinct guide the primitive man to
well-regulated marital relations, such as we find among many animals, so
again his emotional life is too crude and limited to allow any scope for
the domestic affections. Inasmuch as, according to Sir John Lubbock,
gratitude, mercy, pity, chastity, forgiveness, humility, are ideas or
feelings unknown to many or most savage tribes, we should naturally
expect that such a highly-compounded and ethereal feeling as Romantic
Love could not exist among them. How could Love dwell in the heart of a
savage who baits a fish-hook with the flesh of a child; who eats his
wife when she has lost her beauty and the muscular power which enabled
her to do all his hard work; who abandons his aged parents, or kills
them, and whose greatest delight in life is to kill an enemy slowly amid
the most diabolic tortures?
Or how could a primitive girl love a man whose courtship consists in
knocking her on the head and carrying her forcibly from her own to his
tribe? A man who, after a very brief period of caresses, neglects her,
takes perhaps another and younger wife, and reduces the first one to the
condition of a slave, refusing to let her eat at his table, throwing her
bones and remains, as to a dog, or even driving her away and killing
her, if she displeases him? These are extreme cases, but they are not
rare; and in a slightly modified form they are found throughout
savagedom.
That Love is a sentiment unknown to savages has been frequently noted in
the works of anthropologists and tourists. When Ploss remarks that the
lowest savages “know as little of marriage relations as animals; still
less do they know the feeling we call Love,” he does a great injustice
to animals, as those who have read the preceding chapter must admit.
Letourneau, in his _Sociologie_, remarks: “Among the Cafres Cousas,
according to Lichtenstein, the sentiment of love does not constitute a
part of marriage. ‘The idea of love, as we understand it,’ says Du
Chaillu, in speaking of a tribe of the Gabon, ‘appears to be unknown to
this tribe.’” Monteiro, speaking of the polygamous tribes of Africa,
says: “The negro knows not love, affection, or jealousy.... In all the
long years I have been in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the
least tenderness for or to a negress.... I have never seen a negro put
his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever
that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either
side. They have no words or expressions in their language indicative of
affection or love.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account